Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. ...
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Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.Less

The Accommodated Animal : Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

Laurie Shannon

Published in print: 2012-12-10

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hellhounds, but the word “animal” itself only appears very rarely in his work, which was in keeping with sixteenth-century usage. As this book reveals, the modern human/animal divide first came strongly into play in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: “I think, therefore I am.” Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what the author terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touchstone, the author explores the creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing the language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, the author argues, carried with it the notion that animals possess their own investments in the world, a point distinct from the question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of the tyranny of humankind. By answering “the question of the animal” historically, the book contributes to cross-disciplinary debates engaging animal studies, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of ...
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What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard’s reign to Henry’s, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter’s inheritance and on the different property obligations among friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the “vagabond king,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, 2 Henry VI and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.Less

Being and Having in Shakespeare

Katharine Eisaman Maus

Published in print: 2013-02-14

What is the relation between who a person is, and what he or she has? A number of Shakespeare’s plays engage with this question, elaborating a “poetics of property” centering on questions of authority and entitlement, of inheritance and prodigality, of the different opportunities afforded by access to land and to chattel property. Richard II and the Henry IV plays construe sovereignty as a form of property right, largely construing imperium, or the authority over persons in a polity, as a form of dominium, the authority of the propertyholder. Nonetheless, what property means changes considerably from Richard’s reign to Henry’s, as the imagined world of the plays is reconfigured to include an urban economy of chattel consumables. The Merchant of Venice, written between Richard II and 1 Henry IV, reimagines, in comic terms, some of the same issues broached in the history plays. It focuses in particular on the problem of the daughter’s inheritance and on the different property obligations among friends, business associates, and spouses. In the figure of the “vagabond king,” theoretically entitled but actually dispossessed, 2 Henry VI and King Lear both coordinate problems of entitlement with conundrums about distributive justice, raising fundamental questions about property relations and social organization.

The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and ...
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The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and in every play he wrote, than the Bible. Shakespeare was a serious, if sometimes skeptical, Bible reader, but he knew too that he could count on his audience recognizing and understanding biblical allusions, since Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pervasively biblical. The book describes this biblical culture, and offers fresh and sometimes surprising interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s plays by reading his biblical allusions in the context of interpretations of Scripture available to him and his audience. Allusions to the Bible sometimes connect to the religious concerns of early modern England, but, in an age when the sacred and secular were inextricably intertwined, biblical characters, stories, and ideas were understood to connect to most areas of human life: love, sex, and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, and science. Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible do not imply any particular religiosity on his part, nor are they evidence for his personal beliefs. Allusion was one of Shakespeare’s most essential literary devices, and allusions to the Bible are one his best methods of engaging his audience and enhancing the meaning of his plays.Less

The Bible in Shakespeare

Hannibal Hamlin

Published in print: 2013-08-29

The Bible in Shakespeare is the first full-length critical study of biblical allusion in Shakespeare’s plays. There is no book Shakespeare alludes to more often, more significantly, and in every play he wrote, than the Bible. Shakespeare was a serious, if sometimes skeptical, Bible reader, but he knew too that he could count on his audience recognizing and understanding biblical allusions, since Elizabethan and Jacobean culture was pervasively biblical. The book describes this biblical culture, and offers fresh and sometimes surprising interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s plays by reading his biblical allusions in the context of interpretations of Scripture available to him and his audience. Allusions to the Bible sometimes connect to the religious concerns of early modern England, but, in an age when the sacred and secular were inextricably intertwined, biblical characters, stories, and ideas were understood to connect to most areas of human life: love, sex, and marriage, history and politics, law and finance, jealousy, betrayal, murder, suffering, and sacrifice, gardening, medicine, and science. Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bible do not imply any particular religiosity on his part, nor are they evidence for his personal beliefs. Allusion was one of Shakespeare’s most essential literary devices, and allusions to the Bible are one his best methods of engaging his audience and enhancing the meaning of his plays.

In this book of the poetics of influence, the indebtedness of Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to a common source, namely the Bible, becomes a powerful tool for displaying three fundamentally different ...
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In this book of the poetics of influence, the indebtedness of Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to a common source, namely the Bible, becomes a powerful tool for displaying three fundamentally different poetic options as well as three different ways of dealing with a conflict central to western culture. In fresh and original discussions of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear, the author discerns what he terms the metagon: not the struggle between the characters on the stage, but a struggle for the control of the play between biblical and non-biblical modes of imagining. Milton seems more single-minded in his reliance on biblical sources, yet from his analysis of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, the author concludes that there are unresolved contradictions, both aesthetic and theological, which threaten the coherence and balance of these poems as well. Blake in his turn perceived these contradictions in the work of his predecessors, condemning both Shakespeare and Milton for allowing their writing to be curbed by Greek and Latin models and claiming for himself a more authentic inspiration — that of ‘the Sublime of the Bible’. But Blake’s marvellous achievements in the sublime mode, as for instance in his Illustrations to Job, often reverse the direction of his biblical source, replacing dialogue with monologue.Less

The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake : A Comparative Study

Harold Fisch

Published in print: 1999-01-01

In this book of the poetics of influence, the indebtedness of Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to a common source, namely the Bible, becomes a powerful tool for displaying three fundamentally different poetic options as well as three different ways of dealing with a conflict central to western culture. In fresh and original discussions of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, and King Lear, the author discerns what he terms the metagon: not the struggle between the characters on the stage, but a struggle for the control of the play between biblical and non-biblical modes of imagining. Milton seems more single-minded in his reliance on biblical sources, yet from his analysis of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, the author concludes that there are unresolved contradictions, both aesthetic and theological, which threaten the coherence and balance of these poems as well. Blake in his turn perceived these contradictions in the work of his predecessors, condemning both Shakespeare and Milton for allowing their writing to be curbed by Greek and Latin models and claiming for himself a more authentic inspiration — that of ‘the Sublime of the Bible’. But Blake’s marvellous achievements in the sublime mode, as for instance in his Illustrations to Job, often reverse the direction of his biblical source, replacing dialogue with monologue.

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play ...
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In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christians and Jews specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, it demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, the book offers a book both on the play itself and on the question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.Less

Blood Relations : Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice

Janet Adelman

Published in print: 2008-04-01

In this book, the author confronts her resistance to The Merchant of Venice as both a critic and a Jew. With a distinctive psychological acumen, this book argues that William Shakespeare's play frames the uneasy relationship between Christians and Jews specifically in familial terms in order to recapitulate the vexed familial relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book locates the promise—or threat—of Jewish conversion as a particular site of tension in the play. Drawing on a variety of cultural materials, it demonstrates that, despite the triumph of its Christians, The Merchant of Venice reflects Christian anxiety and guilt about its simultaneous dependence on and disavowal of Judaism. In this psycho-theological analysis, both the insistence that Shylock's daughter Jessica remain racially bound to her father after her conversion and the depiction of Shylock as a bloody-minded monster are understood as antidotes to Christian uneasiness about a Judaism it can neither own nor disown. In taking seriously the religious discourse of The Merchant of Venice, the book offers a book both on the play itself and on the question of Jews and Judaism in Renaissance England and beyond.

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly ...
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Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. This book revises our understanding of music's relationship to language in Renaissance England. It shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged. Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare's plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale) and Milton's A Maske, the book challenges the consensus that music's affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare, more than any other early modern poet, exposed the fault lines in the debate about music's function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.Less

Broken Harmony : Shakespeare and the Politics of Music

Joseph M. Ortiz

Published in print: 2011-02-14

Music was a subject of considerable debate during the Renaissance. The notion that music could be interpreted in a meaningful way clashed regularly with evidence that music was in fact profoundly promiscuous in its application and effects. Subsequently, much writing in the period reflects a desire to ward off music's illegibility rather than come to terms with its actual effects. This book revises our understanding of music's relationship to language in Renaissance England. It shows the degree to which discussions of music were ideologically and politically charged. Offering a historically nuanced account of the early modern debate over music, along with close readings of several of Shakespeare's plays (including Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale) and Milton's A Maske, the book challenges the consensus that music's affinity with poetry was widely accepted, or even desired, by Renaissance poets. Shakespeare, more than any other early modern poet, exposed the fault lines in the debate about music's function in art, repeatedly staging disruptive scenes of music that expose an underlying struggle between textual and sensuous authorities. Such musical interventions in textual experiences highlight the significance of sound as an aesthetic and sensory experience independent of any narrative function.

Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as ...
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Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as Author’ and has been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare’s characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. This book explodes these critical commonplaces. Drawing on classical and sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images (enargeia). ‘Circumstances’—which we now think of as incalculable contingencies—were originally topics of forensic enquiry into human intention or passion. Shakespeare used these topics to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. The book discusses Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, Lear, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Macbeth, as well as Gorboduc, The Maid’s Tragedy, and plays by Lyly and Jonson. It reveals the importance of circumstantial proof to various dramatists and highlights Shakespeare’s distinctive use of circumstances to create vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. The book engages with eighteenth-century and contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of probability, psychoanalytic criticism, and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.Less

Circumstantial Shakespeare

Lorna Hutson

Published in print: 2015-09-01

Shakespeare’s characters are thought to be his greatest achievement—imaginatively autonomous, possessed of depth and individuality. This view has survived the deconstruction of ‘Shakespeare as Author’ and has been revitalized by the recent emphasis on the collaborative nature of early modern theatre. But belief in the autonomous imaginative life of Shakespeare’s characters depends on another unexamined myth: the myth that Shakespeare rejected neoclassicism, playing freely with theatrical time and place. This book explodes these critical commonplaces. Drawing on classical and sixteenth-century rhetorical pedagogy, it reveals the importance of topics of circumstance (Time, Place, and Motive, etc.) in the conjuring of compelling narratives and vivid mental images (enargeia). ‘Circumstances’—which we now think of as incalculable contingencies—were originally topics of forensic enquiry into human intention or passion. Shakespeare used these topics to imply offstage actions, times, and places in terms of the motives and desires we attribute to the characters. The book discusses Romeo and Juliet, Lucrece, Lear, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Macbeth, as well as Gorboduc, The Maid’s Tragedy, and plays by Lyly and Jonson. It reveals the importance of circumstantial proof to various dramatists and highlights Shakespeare’s distinctive use of circumstances to create vivid and coherent dramatic worlds and a sense of the unconscious feelings of characters inhabiting them. The book engages with eighteenth-century and contemporary Shakespeare criticism, semiotics of theatre, forensic rhetoric, humanist pedagogy, the prehistory of probability, psychoanalytic criticism, and sixteenth-century constitutional thought.

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious ...
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This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious issue of cosmetic practice and identifies a ‘culture of cosmetics’, which finds its visual identity on the Renaissance stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and their relationship to drama, as well as to the construction of early modern identities.Less

Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama

Farah Karim-Cooper

Published in print: 2006-07-06

This study examines how the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries dramatise the cultural preoccupation with cosmetics. The author analyses contemporary tracts that address the then-contentious issue of cosmetic practice and identifies a ‘culture of cosmetics’, which finds its visual identity on the Renaissance stage. She also examines cosmetic recipes and their relationship to drama, as well as to the construction of early modern identities.

‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto ...
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‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto of 1609, but was not included in the First Folio (1623) collection of his plays. This book examines rival theories about the quarto's origins and offers compelling evidence that Pericles is the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and the minor dramatist George Wilkins, who was responsible for the first two acts and for portions of the ‘brothel scenes’ in Act 4. Pericles serves as a test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to identify co-authors. A wide range of metrical, lexical, and other data is analysed. Computerized ‘stylometric’ texts are explained and their findings assessed. A concluding chapter introduces a new technique that has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.Less

Defining Shakespeare : Pericles as Test Case

MacDonald P. Jackson

Published in print: 2003-08-28

‘That very great play, Pericles’, as T. S. Eliot called it, poses formidable problems of text and authorship. The first of the Late Romances, it was ascribed to Shakespeare when printed in a quarto of 1609, but was not included in the First Folio (1623) collection of his plays. This book examines rival theories about the quarto's origins and offers compelling evidence that Pericles is the product of collaboration between Shakespeare and the minor dramatist George Wilkins, who was responsible for the first two acts and for portions of the ‘brothel scenes’ in Act 4. Pericles serves as a test case for methodologies that seek to define the limits of the Shakespeare canon and to identify co-authors. A wide range of metrical, lexical, and other data is analysed. Computerized ‘stylometric’ texts are explained and their findings assessed. A concluding chapter introduces a new technique that has the potential to answer many of the remaining questions of attribution associated with Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a ...
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This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a play to which Shakespeare contributed. It shows that he was largely responsible for scenes 4–9, which constitute Act III in editions divided into acts. So it adds to the mounting evidence that early in his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights in the writing of scripts, as was common at the time. The second half of the volume provides grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe’s inclusion of A Lover’s Complaint within the 1609 quarto entitled Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. The poem’s authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto’s ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.Less

Determining the Shakespeare Canon : Arden of Faversham and A Lover's Complaint

MacDonald P. Jackson

Published in print: 2014-06-19

This book aims to solve two problems of the Shakespeare canon. It makes the case for adding Arden of Faversham, first published anonymously in 1592, to editions of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, as a play to which Shakespeare contributed. It shows that he was largely responsible for scenes 4–9, which constitute Act III in editions divided into acts. So it adds to the mounting evidence that early in his career Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights in the writing of scripts, as was common at the time. The second half of the volume provides grounds for accepting that publisher Thomas Thorpe’s inclusion of A Lover’s Complaint within the 1609 quarto entitled Shakespeare Sonnets was justified. The poem’s authenticity has been vigorously challenged in recent years. Its status is crucial to how critics assess the authority of the quarto’s ordering of sonnets and interpret the structure of the sequence as a whole. These two problems of attribution are each addressed in five separate chapters that describe the converging results of different approaches and rebut counter-arguments. Stylometric techniques, using the resources of computers and electronic databases, are applied and the research methodologies of other scholars explained and evaluated. Quantitative tests are supplemented with traditional literary-critical analysis.